Visual software evolution reconstruction

The analysis of the evolution of large software systems is challenging for many reasons, such as the retrieval and processing of historical information and the large quantity of data that must be dealt with. While recent research advances have led to solutions to these problems, a central question remains: How do we deal with this information in a methodical way and where do we start with our analysis? We present a methodology based on interactive visualizations which support the reconstruction of the evolution of software systems. We propose several visualizations which help us to perform software evolution analysis of a system “in the large ” and “in the small”, and apply them to 2 large systems